


Scapegoat

by mogwai_do



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Episode: s05e12 Comes a Horseman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-06 21:38:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/740443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mogwai_do/pseuds/mogwai_do
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Methos can be pushed only so far, and Duncan was right at the end of Revelations 6:8</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scapegoat

Fuck!

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck!

Why the fuck did life take such obvious pleasure in screwing him over? It had really outdone itself this time - Kronos _and_ Cassandra. Someone, somewhere, was laughing their ass off, but the eldest Immortal wasn't amused. At all.

Methos stalked into the bathroom and started the water, splashing his face with the icy liquid. It didn't help. He wanted to run - as far and fast as he could, to free himself from the clinging webs of his past. He wanted to smash something - shatter it into pieces that would fall at his feet, like the chains of belonging that he himself had helped forge. Worst of all, he wanted to hurt - anyone within reach, maybe even himself. It was a familiar, if long-buried, impulse. He wanted to cut - with a word, with a blade, and watch the life come bleeding out as his own had. He might have done it too, if a thousand years hadn't taught him that as good as it felt at the time, ultimately it didn't help. His jaw clenched tight against the helpless rage that swamped him when he realised just how badly this was going to hurt.

He blinked back burning tears, studying the face that stared back at him from the mirror. It was a hard, uncompromising face; the same one he had seen for a thousand years and on and off since. The hair was shorter and the war paint was long since gone, but the fundamentals remained unchanged and always would. Cassandra was right in that at least; he would always be Death, her mistake lay in believing that was all he was or would ever be. Methos broke his own gaze and looked down; his hands were almost as white as the porcelain he gripped so tightly. Looking up again, he absently noted the muscle along his jaw rippling with the effort of keeping his lips pressed shut against a scream of anger and frustration.

Quick as a viper his fist lashed out, smashing the mirror to shards, not even feeling it as his hand knitted itself back together. Like a switch being tripped, his near-blinding fury metamorphosed into something far colder and stronger - an all-pervading, icy calm that even Kronos had learned to be wary of. Melodramatic displays of temper solved nothing, they were Kronos forte not his, but the spilled blood felt somehow necessary - a promise to himself, not unlike the one his brother had demanded of him.

Methos raised his eyes to his fragmented reflection; every shard revealing a facet of the totality that was Methos, but only one held his attention. In his reflection's eyes he saw the events of the near-future play out. Actions and reactions, possibilities analysed and cast aside, courses chosen and consequences weighed and accepted.

Kronos trusted Death, thought he knew him, but that was a mistake. True, Kronos knew him better than any creature living or dead, even three thousand years wouldn't be enough to blunt that knowledge. He would spot an act, but he would also recognise his dearest brother and with that recognition would come complacency or as close to it as Kronos ever got.

It was a dangerous, dangerous game to play, but they were the only sort that offered a challenge any more to the creature that had been named Death even by those closest to him. Death was the means, not the motivation, and Methos now was very different from the Methos that had first donned that guise. It was strangely fitting that Death was the only part of him cold enough to engineer the destruction of the Horsemen and with them this traitorous piece of his past.

In his mind's eye he could almost see events unfolding, the first step no more than half an hour away, once Cassandra finished relating her tale of woe to the boy scout. Unable to disbelieve her, the Highlander would confront his former friend and Methos would let him see behind Adam's mask, but only to the next.

He would let Duncan see something the Highlander could never understand - that Methos had never been ashamed of Death. The characteristics had existed within him long before that particular aspect had been born. It was only the use to which they were put that bothered him sometimes. For the Highlander, who he was and what he did were inextricably bound, he hadn't lived long enough yet to understand that it didn't always work that way. Duncan would reject it, reject him, completely. It would hurt, it would hurt a lot, but Death had always been good with pain, able to lock it away and shield it behind layers of history so deep no-one would ever find it. When Death had served his purpose, then and only then, would Methos feel the cost.

If he was lucky he might be able to salvage something of his friendship with the Highlander. He could view the prospect objectively now; he was aiming for saving their lives, anything else was a bonus. When it was over, if he succeeded, he could mourn the rest. Death could and would take the blame, a convenient scapegoat sacrificed to their survival. Maybe some day centuries from now, Methos would let the Highlander know the truth, not just about the ruthless manipulations he was about to perpetrate, but about Methos himself and the role Death would always play in his life. That Death had only ever been as real as Adam Pierson - a visible facet of the creature that waited behind all the masks and lies like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, waiting for someone who could see and understand the whole.

But he was getting ahead of himself, first he had to see them both through this alive. 

Methos' focus returned to the here and now as he settled back within himself, feeling his body reshape itself to his will. The tension eased by slow degrees; a strange sort of freedom settling into muscle and bone as his natural strength and power reasserted itself, no longer the vulnerable Adam Pierson. It was comforting in its familiarity and vaguely unsettling by the same token.

Glittering eyes met his, green and gold and brown, but flat and hard - like murky water beneath a sheet of ice or a pane of glass. For a long moment he lost himself in their depths - Death on a Horse, as close as a lover - closer. He couldn't run from it, however much he sometimes wanted to; couldn't destroy it and that was worse, not because he couldn't, but because he didn't want to. To thine own self be true was a principle he had lived by long before the phrase had ever been coined. In 5,000 years Methos had neither killed nor tamed his darkness; he had never denied it and in that acceptance had found the balance he needed to survive. He tried to live his life outside of his own shadow, but sometimes it was necessary to take refuge in its concealing darkness.

A short, harsh laugh escaped him at the irony of it. Kronos saw him as Death, Cassandra saw him as Death, together they had convinced the Highlander that Methos was, in fact, Death. Sometimes perception did rule reality and who was he to gainsay them. Death would ride again, as inevitable as the Christian Bible had made it out to be, and he would bring his own unique brand of apocalypse. Methos had long ago learned the cost of careless wishes, but it seemed it was a lesson others had yet to learn. _No-one_ dictated to him.

 

FIN


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